A BOA Phishing E-Mail Reaches AFMC Officer

Any person using a computer is vulnerable to phishing attacks and it's also beyond the protective power of the military ranks. This showed up on July 3, 2007, the day Lt. Gen. Terry Gabreski, vice commander of Air Force Materiel Command, received phishing e-mail in her inbox. Blackanthem published this in news on July 16, 2007.

The e-mail posed to come from the Bank of America (BOA), which provides travel cards to federal employees. Perhaps for this reason, the main office of AFMC receives on average three phishing e-mails every week purporting to be from the Bank of America, said Andrew Papp, AFMC's program coordinator for the Visa travel card of BOA. AFMC reported this on July 16, 2007.

Phishers use fraudulent techniques pretending as businesses in e-communication or other legitimate people to capture sensitive information like passwords and credit card details. The key instruments for phishing are e-mails or instant messages.

Since everyone is a possible target, people must be wary of suspicious e-mails. Any e-mail that asks the recipient to update his/her financial or personal information is fraudulent. These days, there are innumerable phishing scams on the Internet, said Brig. Gen. David Price, Director for the Financial Management at AFMC Headquarters. Blackanthem reported this on July 16, 2007.

A part of the BOA phishing e-mail said that to get an upgrade the recipient needed to update his/her account to avoid any technical mistakes at the bank processors' end. The e-mail then instructed the recipient to use the link for the update task.

According to banks and other financial institutions, online criminals distribute such bogus e-mails apparently from trusted sources. This also includes Bank of America, which issues official travel cards to members of the Defense department. The typical words that the latest scam asks its targets are to "confirm", "validate" or "update" their account details.

About 2 Million US citizens have suffered raids on their checking accounts by criminals during the past year. The average loss to consumers per incident was $1,200 adding the total losses to more than $2 Billion for 2006-07, according to market research group Gartner's survey in June 2007.